Digital Publishing Bootcamp
July 17-19th | Download the brochure for more information
| 8:00 AM | Breakfast and registration |
| 9:00 AM | Integrating Digital Publishing: Seven Pillars for Success |
| 10:30 AM | Morning Break |
| 11:00AM | Creating, Curating, and Publishing Insanely Great Digital Content |
| 12:30 PM | Improving Findability through SEO Blogging |
| 1:00 PM | Luncheon |
| 2:00 PM | Choosing the Best Revenue Models for your Business |
| 3:30 PM | Afternoon Break |
| 4:00 PM | Analyzing Media Habits of Digital Natives |
| 5:30 PM | Networking Cocktail Reception |
Day 2 – Wednesday, July 18
| 9:00 AM | Building a Better Website: How to Do it For Less |
| 10:30 AM | Morning Break |
| 11:00AM | Growing Your Digital Audience: Gain More Fans, Followers, and Subscribers |
| 12:30 PM | Unlocking the Power of Twitter |
| 1:00 PM | Luncheon |
| 2:00 PM | Publishing Digital Magazines: iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Beyond |
| 3:30 PM | Afternoon Break |
| 4:00 PM | Streamlining Digital Asset Workflows |
Day 3 – Thursday, July 19
| 9:00 AM | Understanding Google Analytics and KPIs: Which Metrics Really Matter? |
| 10:30 AM | Morning Break |
| 11:00AM | Managing the Customer Experience: How to Automate Practically Everything |
| 12:30 PM | Conducting a Digital Publishing Audit |
| 1:00 PM | Luncheon |
| 2:00 PM | Forecasting the Future: Master the Art of Proxy Metric Modeling |
| 3:30 PM | Afternoon Break |
| 4:00 PM | What’s Next for Digital Publishers? |
| 5:00 PM | Bootcamp Concludes |
Day One
9:00am | Integrating Digital Publishing: Seven Pillars for Success
In today’s competitive environment, success is highly contingent upon understanding and managing several key tenets. As readers’ consumption habits rapidly shift from print to digital formats, nimbly managing this transition is critical to maintaining and growing market share. this focused session provides a framework for understanding what’s happening in the world of digital publishing and developing an integrated publishing strategy.
Together, we will discuss the seven pillars to achieving success: understand your audience, know your competition, leverage your keywords, publish affinity content, build effective websites, distribute across many platforms, and quantify your business.
11:00am | Creating, Curating, and Publishing Insanely Great Digital Content
How do you become a recognized industry authority? The short answer: through great content. But how do you ensure that your content is on-topic and on-trend, all the time? Where do you find relevant ideas? What’s the most cost-and time-effective way to generate affinity content that is as valuable as your premium content?
At its core, publishing affinity content is about creating a platform for getting found. All link- building efforts are focused on your blog or portal—which serves as the foundation for building your audience. While email, twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are important tools for generating traffic and referrals, premium magazine and book content are the real “power” for your blog or portal. In this session, you will learn how to use premium content to fuel your traffic- and audience-building efforts and develop an affinity content calendar that is based on your premium content production.
12:30pm | Improving Findability through SEO Blogging
In this interactive workshop, you’ll peek into the psyche of your target audience to learn more about how they search for information about your topics. Leverage this knowledge to improve your editorial and marketing efforts and discover effective ways to maximize your editorial content by transforming long-form articles into short-form blog and social media posts.
2:00pm | Choosing the Best Revenue Models For Your Business
Through our extensive work with media brands around the country, Mequoda has identified twelve discrete ways to generate online revenue. In this session, we will show you how to mix and match different models, depending on your company, brand, expertise, and experience. You’ll explore twelve integrated digital business models and strategies used by a handful of top online publishers, each ranked by increasing publisher accountability.
You’ll be exposed to real-world examples of successful publishing programs that include a variety of business models, including events, subscriptions, single copies, software, videos, books, merchandise, leads, clicks, impressions, listings, and endorsements.
4:00pm | Analyzing Media Habits of Digital Natives
Positioning your business to satisfy the media consumption habits of digital natives—those born after 1980—is critical to sustaining success. Sharing the results of Mequoda’s recent survey, Don and Kim will provide breakthrough insights and findings into digital natives’ media consumption habits.
Understanding how digital natives differ from digital immigrants those born before 1980—is vital to ensuring that your organization is equipped to deliver value over the long term. How do digital natives view honesty, integrity, and communications when it comes to business? How do they use social media and the web to communicate with family, friends, and their favorite corporate and media brands? How do their digital subscription habits differ from their print subscription habits?
Day Two
9:00am | Building a Better Website: How to Do it For Less
To grow, a multiplatform publisher must have a website that drives traffic, builds relationships, and sells subscription and information products. Achieving these goals is highly contingent upon having a robust portal, an ecommerce store, and a subscription website. In this session, you will learn how to develop an efficient website strategy—one that enables you to build a better website in less time, and for less money.
Using a framework as the backbone for your website’s architecture and functionality, you will acquire tips for improving website usability and reducing time to market.
11:00am | Growing Your Digital Audience: Gain More Fans, Followers, and Subscribers
Driving website traffic remains fundamental to every publisher’s success. Learn dozens of ways to drive traffic and leverage your website’s architecture to capture and build relationships. Acquire proven strategies for building your email subscriber file and cultivating a social media presence.
Social media has redefined the way people read and distribute online content—having moved way beyond the “forward to a friend” function. In this session, you will examine best practice examples of publishers who effectively use Google, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, and other niche social networks to drive traffic, build relationships, and influence sales.
12:30pm | Unlocking the Power of Twitter
Twitter can be a phenomenal tool for driving traffic to your site, soliciting and joining conversations, and establishing credibility as an expert in your niche. In this workshop, you will acquire a deeper understanding of Twitter lingo and etiquette, and discover best-in-class techniques for growing your follower base. You will also learn how to write optimized headlines that maximize sharing and clicks on Twitter.
2:00pm | Publishing Digital Magazines: iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Beyond
According to Gartner, tablet sales will hit 326.3 million units by 2015, yet many publishers do not have a tablet publishing strategy in place.
Optimizing your content for each tablet’s specific characteristics can be a significant investment, but the costs of doing nothing are likely to be far greater—resulting in diminished user experiences, less traffic, and ultimately, lost sales. Prioritizing efforts is key. In this session, you will examine how digital publishers are adapting their strategies to deliver content anytime, everywhere, on every device.
Gain insights into the latest tablet trends, marketing techniques, and digital publishing software, and get help deciding which platforms to support. Acquire techniques for reducing edition production time and develop criteria for determining when to go “replica,” when to reflow, and when to enhance.
4:00pm | Streamlining Digital Asset Workflows
The explosion of digital marketing and publishing has dramatically disrupted traditional workflows. As a result, today’s publishers increasingly strive for automated, efficient workflows. In this discussion, we’ll explore pros and cons of different approaches, including:
Determining whether to train current staff or hire new staff to serve as digital publishing experts; measuring the costs associated with transitioning to a new CMS; estimating your return on investment; determining how much time you have to make a switch (before it’s too late); understanding best practices for automating production on multiple platforms; determining whether your organization needs a central content repository; incorporating social media platforms into your digital content workflow; and creating a calendar that anticipates platforms you are using now and may use in the future.
Day Three
9:00am | Understanding Google Analytics and KPIs: Which Metrics Really Matter?
Knowing the definitions of common Google Analytics terms like visits, pageviews, and bounce rates is important, but it’s only half the battle. For websites, some metrics are more important than others, and understanding their context is key. Knowing which key metrics to follow can be confusing—in fact, many site owners end up paying attention to the wrong ones.
In this session, we’ll review key metrics, learn the deeper meaning behind them, and examine how to use them to your advantage. Learn to use key performance indicators (KPIs) to make better resource, staffing, and content performance decisions. Find out how to use Google Analytics as a way to monitor the performance of your web and email activity, ecommerce systems, and SEO and link-building efforts.
Finally, learn the ten key metrics you should watch every day and understand how to build a key metrics dashboard that everyone in your organization can use and comprehend.
11:00am | Managing the Customer Experience: How to Automate Practically Everything
In the old days, publishers ran a complex distribution system that involved printing, paper, trucking and postage. Today’s mix is equally complex, involving myriad digital systems that distribute content across multiple platforms.
Digital publishing is about more than just producing and marketing digital content. It’s about using systems and setting automation rules and protocols to communicate with your customers in new and relevant ways.
Understand how core systems are evolving to include a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management system (CRMS), a marketing automation system, and a digital asset management system—all of which combine to create a customer experience management system (CXMS). Learn how these systems overlap and interact and examine how they can integrate with your retail partners, websites, and affinity platforms that support Twitter, Facebook, email, and blogs.
12:30pm | Conducting a Digital Publishing Audit
This workshop provides a quantifiable methodology, or scorecard, for auditing your current market position. By analyzing scorecard data, you can identify high- and underperforming areas and accordingly, make better resource allocation decisions. Some publishers refer to this audit as the ultimate audience reporting tool, as it shows, at a very high level, the direct impact that marketing and resource decisions have on market share.
2:00pm | Forecasting the Future: Master the Art of Proxy Metric Modeling
Discover a simple and easy way to forecast the future of your digital publishing business. Discussing the handful of key metrics that can be used as “proxy” metric assumptions, we will simplify the process of modeling your digital business.
As part of this session, you will play a quick sensitivity game to identify your business’s leverage points. Don and Kim will share a time-tested Powerpoint-based business plan format that you can use to rally the troops, gain executive support, and when necessary, raise capital for your digital publishing business
4:00pm | What’s Next for Digital Publishers?
In this wrap-up session, you will have the opportunity to ask questions about any of the program’s topics. In addition, you can take this opportunity to prioritize your digital initiatives for the coming year while getting a glimpse at next-generation tools and trends that are shaping the future of digital publishing.
